Revision as of 02:44, 29 June 2013

This article is for users that have a mouse with more than 7 mouse buttons and want to be able to use all of them. Logitech makes several of these (if you have a Logitech Marble® Mouse you can also look at this page), and Microsoft makes a few as well.

Prerequisites

Note: These are helper comments, and can be ignored if you are looking for nothing but raw information. Due to community feedback, I decided to add a bit more commenting that describes what's going on "behind the scenes" with this configuration.

We will be using the evdev driver for Xorg. EVentDEVice is an advanced driver for USB input devices which offers much greater power over the standard Xorg mouse driver. It is also more "direct" than the mouse driver, allowing lower latency and less translation issues.

Note that evdev is both a kernel module and an Xorg input driver. All the Arch kernels come with the evdev module.

With the newer Xorg 11R7.0 it seems only the following changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf need to be made with nothing else needing to be done.

Finding the mouse name

Note: To get accurate information it is sometimes required to execute this command from a boot where no Xorg or mouse drivers have been loaded.

The first step is to find the name of the mouse. To do this, execute the following command:

Replace the Name option with the name you copied from above. You may also omit the CorePointer option if you use multiple mice or experience errors when attempting to load Xorg. The other options are all basic mouse configurations for evdev and should work with most mice.

Next, we need to tell X to use the mouse, so look in xorg.conf for ServerLayout.

Modify the ServerLayout section to use "Evdev Mouse" as the device. When you are done, it should look something like this:

With a Desktop type keyboard-mouse, this does not work because there is only one USB attachment and /dev/input/by-id contains only the keyboard.
In this case, we can create a udev rule to get a consistent link.
The following rules create the link /dev/input/usbmouse which points on the correct event entry:

Firefox 3

Note: If you use the true value for numlines, your left/right will be inverted.

Thumb Buttons - forward and back

Note: The following maybe redundant depending on whether xev detects all your mouse buttons correctly (functions can be mapped on a per-app basis) or you want to change the default behaviour.

To do this we need to map keystrokes to the desired mouse buttons and install xvkbd and xbindkeys.

In most modern applications which use back/forward features, XF86Back is mapped to back and XF86Forward is mapped to forward by default. On most MX mice the thumb buttons resolve to 8 & 9. If your mouse is different, check button numbers using xev and replace the numbers used in the example (b:8 & b:9).

So if you have an MX mouse you would create the file ~/.xbindkeysrc, containing:

Now to test... Run the following command and if it works as expected remember to add xbindkeys to .xinitrc or somewhere where it will be executed each time X starts. Also, this should work with Epiphany and Konqueror without any additional configuration or use of imwheel.

xmodmap tweaking

Note: None of the below is necessary with evdev, but it's here for non-evdev users. Unless something doesn't work on your mouse, ignore this whole section!

If you use .xinitrc to load X, then add this to .xinitrc (change for the number of buttons you have):

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 4 5" &

Note that buttons 4 and 5 must go on the end or else your scroll wheel won't work.

If you use GDM/XDM/KDM instead of .xinitrc, then create the file ~/.Xmodmap and add this to it (change for the number of buttons you have):

pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 4 5

GDM/XDM/KDM read the ~/.Xmodmap file if it's present, whereas startx does not. Another solution would be to add this to your ~/.xinitrc: xmodmap -e $(cat ~/.Xmodmap). This would allow you to use *DM and startx while only having to edit ~/.Xmodmap when you need to make changes.

You may have to play with these numbers a bit to get your desired behavior. Some mice use buttons 6 and 7 for the scroll wheel, in which case those buttons would have to be the last numbers. Keep playing with it until it works!

You can also check to see which buttons are being read with a program called 'xev', which is part of XOrg. When xev is run, it will show a box on your desktop that you can put the cursor into and click buttons to find out what buttons have been mapped.

Alternate methods

The following methods use standard X.org mouse input driver (xf86-input-mouse) instead of using the evdev driver. It works on mice up to 7 buttons. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf InputDevice section for your mouse to reflect the changes shown below. Then restart X and you're done.

Method 1 - IMPS/2

This has been tested on an IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0. Your mileage may vary, as this does not seem to work for all said mice.

Method 5 - easystroke

easystroke is a mouse gesture application, but it can be used to manage mouse buttons as well. It's main advantage o-ver btnx is that it's more versatile. On the other hand, it's user-based, so any user has to configure it to reflect his own needs.

In order to set up easystroke to manage your extra mouse buttons, you'll need to do this (example features Back/Forward mouse buttons) :
run:

Note: In case of easystroke doesn't automatically detect mouse buttons, you can specify it manually. Button identifiers (numbers) can be viewed by xev.

Go to Action tab > Add action, give the new action a name, as Type choose "Key", as Details set "Alt+Left" for Back button, "Alt+Right" for Forward button, as Stroke click the proper mouse button (confirm if a warning is displayed), and voilà! Your mouse button is configured.

Note: Since Firefox 3, buttons 6 + 7 are no longer mapped to back and forward as in Firefox 2. Therefore, if using the above methods in Xorg, refer further to corrective methods below if necessary.

Firefox 3 button 6 + 7 correction

For MX518, try changing the above ButtonMapping Option to:

Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 8 9"

And restart X. (Successfully tested on MX518)

Another method:

Leave back/forward mapped to 6+7 in xorg. In Firefox 3 about:config change the following keys:

Binding keyboard to mouse buttons

xvkbd and xbindkeys

Let's say we want to bind some mouse buttons to keyboard ones. The problem we will encounter is that we do not know how to emulate a key press. Here comes in handy xvkbd. We can use it along with xbindkeys.

If you want to check your mouse buttons number use xev. Don't forget to type capital letters in xvkbd -text usage and to escape opening bracket with \, or you get simply [Shift] written.

Here is an example for xbindkeys to enable x selection paste(third click pasting), you need both xsel and xvkbd installed, What it does it executes that command whenever button 13 of the mouse is pressed (in ~/.xbindkeysrc) :

"xvkbd -no-jump-pointer -text "\D1$(xsel)" 2>/dev/null"
b:13

Why standard methods are not enough?

This will work great for X servers, but it seems not to work in some specific situations, like in Enemy Territory game. So I will describe a bit more advanced configuration, which work with my logitech G5 buttons - I can use all my 5 additional buttons along with 3 standard and a scroll, which gives overall 10 events to use in Enemy Territory. So here we go:

Note: Update: evrouter can now simulate X11 key events so it is now possible to skip kbde and only use evrouter to bind keyboard buttons to your mouse.

kbde

To emulate keystroke which will be later detected in Enemy Territory we need something more advanced than xvkbd. Here comes in handy kbde, but it doesn't exist in AUR yet – we've got to compile it by ourselves. We need two programs: kbde and kbde-driver. Kbde website is located on sourceforge [1], check it for download, you need only kbde-driver. Apparently, it doesn't work for me without some hacking. Use your editor and add

#include <linux/version.h>

somewhere near other includes in the driver/kbde.c file. (OK, I'm not sure whether it is a proper way to compile it, but it works).
Assuming that you've already done that try:

tar -zxvf kbde-driver-1*
cd kbde-driver-1*
make
# if you do not have sudo just use su and type this as root
sudo make install mknod
modprobe kbde

and now you should have kbde working. If you want to use it as a non-root (yes, you want) change permissions, the quickest and dirtiest way is (note that I added my startup scripts at the end of this text):

chgrp users /dev/kbde
chmod 220 /dev/kbde

If not try reading installation instructions on the site. Now we can use it to emulate keystrokes visible even in login shells:

kbde --press 5 --release 5 -b

this will press 5 for about three times. If you want to type a string using this, rather than this use --asci=STRING, as press sometimes generates 3 strokes before it is released.

evrouter

Now we need something which will work when Enemy Territory is loaded. Apparently, xbindkeys does not work here, so we need another program: evrouter [2], which can be found in the AUR: [3]

OK, so now we must have evdev and we can NOT use it in X, so here is how my example /etc/X11/xorg.conf mouse section looks like:

and now we have to restart the X server.
You will run this as user, and event devices are owned by root, so you got to change the permissions at this point. Let us say we do it just like that, but I advise you to do this more carefully (note that I added my start-up scripts at the end of this text):

chgrp users /dev/input/event*
chmod 660 /dev/input/event*

Now we can use the --dump option to check what we will have to bind and to which device:

evrouter --dump /dev/input/event*
# here click buttons you would like to bind

It will give you output similar to config. Here is my example config ~/.evrouterrc with kbde usage:

This works great, even in Enemy Territory. The "none" modifier means that I have to only press the button, other options are Template:Keypress and so on. Here I use "any" because "none" means that after pressing Template:Keypress, Template:Keypress, or Template:Keypress, our buttons would not work. Also note that it accepts regular expressions for mouse name and event path. Then, after setting up a config, run service with:

evrouter /dev/input/event* >> /dev/null

or change the event* to a device corresponding to your mouse -- but be aware that the numbers are changing sometimes. It will work in background, while outputting some annoying messages, so we stream it to /dev/null. If something went wrong, run it without streaming and check what it outputs. If you want to end it, you have to delete /tmp/evrouter.* manually. Here is a script to kill evrouter:

You have to edit the mydevicename variable to its proper value (the one which is shown by evrouter -D), or just change it to listen on all events by changing device var to /dev/input/event*. OK, I have saved them in /usr/bin/. Now, everything should be ready for use!

This will change your DPI to 2000, light the 1st LED and disables DPI on-the-fly changing, so you can use it with evrouter. If you would use it frequently I suggest you to copy it to the /usr/bin directory:

# cp g5hack /usr/bin/

If you want to bind your Template:Keypress and Template:Keypress buttons you must copy the line at the bottom (one with the comment '"-" button does not function anymore' above) to the mode you will be using, like, for example, under the "case 3:" you can put it on the line with the comment 'turn on third led' above (deleting the old one before of course).

For the newest G5 mouse which is reported as "product 0xc049" original hack does not work. You have to simply change the #define MOUSE_G5 0xc041 to #define MOUSE_G5 0xc049 and recompile.

startup scripts

Currently, I am using a startup script with a few dirty methods, so if somebody can propose better, please edit. I have created an input group and made my user a member of it.

/etc/rc.local:

#!/bin/bash
# creating /dev/kbde nod and changing permissions
# also do not forget to add kbde in modules line in /etc/rc.conf
# to be honest, I'm not sure why we have to create /dev/kbde after each startup, but it seems that only this way it works
# maybe first check if it's needed for you, too
mknod --mode=220 /dev/kbde c 11 0
chgrp input /dev/kbde
# changing permissions for event* -- evrouter needs that
chmod 660 /dev/input/event*
chgrp input /dev/input/event*
# g5hack ran for a few times to make sure that it'll work...
# note that I've add it to /usr/bin, you should probably put your full path here
# you probably should skip this lines, especially if you do not have a Logitech g5/g3/g7
g5hack /dev/usb/hiddev0 3
g5hack /dev/usb/hiddev0 3
g5hack /dev/usb/hiddev0 3

~/.kde/Autostart/init:

#!/bin/bash
# there I use my script to start evrouter, which I have presented above
evrouter-start
# here I map my buttons so I can use G5 thumb button as push to talk in TS
# note that I have to use it as middle button also on KDE
# you probably do not need it
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 9 3 4 5 6 7 2 8 10 11 12"

And voila, we've got it working immediately after KDE login.

User tools

imwheelAUR provides configurable mouse wheel and button mapping. It can be configured globally or for individual processes.

Sample ~/.imwheelrc to enable back/forward thumb buttons for all applications and increased scroll speed in Chromium:

lomoco for Logitech MX mice will help you set the proper resolution, enable or disable smart scroll (with boot time support too!), etc. lomoco is available from the [community] repository and can be installed with the following command:

Be sure to look at /etc/udev/lomoco_mouse.conf and set up the the options you want to be automatically applied when the mouse gets loaded by udev.

Note: The lomoco package may be out of date. There is a hack for newer Logitech mice: [5]

Device Specific Configuration Files

R.A.T. 7 and R.A.T. 9 Mouse

This is the configuration file that will get your R.A.T. 7 or R.A.T. 9 mouse working properly under linux.